Introducing learning innovation into a large traditional corporation is a bit like prospecting. It requires a delicate combination of skill, timing, and luck to overcome not only the expected resistance to change but also the general lack of influence that is the lot of most learning organizations.
At Bechtel, a global engineering and construction company, projects are the heart of the business. Many of our 52,000 employees are working on projects across six continents and on mega-projects so large that they could be stand-alone business themselves. For a company of this size and global dispersion, our Learning and Development department is relatively small. The department’s traditional role, creating courses and using a learning management system to track results, gives us little connection to the projects, making the challenge of introducing learning innovation even greater.
Undaunted by these obstacles, in 2009,we launched the Bechtel Learning 2.0 Challenge to learn how we might use Web 2.0 effectively for learning and to connect with our audience. The Learning 2.0 Challenge was a competition in which we challenged Bechtel's employees to develop an approach using Web 2.0 tools to improve learning effectiveness. The challenge was extremely successful; participation was triple what we anticipated; and we were impressed by the technical quality and imagination of the finalists’ entries. In addition, the competition helped attract more favorable attitudes to Web 2.0 from Bechtel senior management. We approached 2010 with cautious optimism and looked for ways to introduce Web 2.0 and informal learning into the corporate fabric.
Make sure the nail fits your hammer
Our first task was to find potential partners who had a real business need. It is better to first find a business need and then see if your solution fits, rather than begin with a solution and try to make every business need fit. Finding a fully committed partner is also vital to success.
In June we found both, or rather they found us. Don Sproul and Brad Dowell, two experienced safety professional supervisors, were referred to us by the Environmental, Safety, and Health (ES&H) learning manager. Since Bechtel has a well earned reputation as a safety leader we knew we had the right partners.
Don and Brad delivered a presentation on Construction New Technologies and Best Practices at the 2010 Bechtel ES&H Conference. The response was so enthusiastic that they wanted to establish an ongoing community to continue the dialogue generated at the conference and were looking for a platform that would support this objective.
Don explains, “Brad and I shared frustrations about not having a common place at Bechtel to share best practices, find out about new technologies, and find out about what other projects are doing. This issue was even more challenging for new employees. Generally the only people who learn what other projects are doing are managers within a business line. Brad and I wanted to exchange information and ideas, and get validation from other sites.”
As it happens, after the Learning 2.0 Challenge, we had been researching the use of social media platforms such as Yammer, Ning, and CubeTree to support communities of practice (CoPs) in an enterprise setting. After analyzing a number of platforms from a CoP perspective, we observed two basic platform approaches, one from Facebook and the other from YouTube. The platforms using the Facebook approach were people-focused and used micro-blogging (or status updates) as the central organizing feature of the user experience (Figure 1). The platforms using the YouTube approach were content-focused and used popularity of a piece of content combined with robust search capabilities as the central organizing feature of the user experience (Figure 2).
Figure 1. Facebook approach
Figure 2. YouTube approach
Another factor was the attitude among older workers towards social media as being insubstantial. “I don’t like Facebook,” Don explained. ”It’s just a chat room, water cooler talk. It’s not a technical resource.”
We decided that for the purpose of the community Don and Brad wanted to start, the content-focused approach was more appropriate. As our platform, we chose Bloomfire (www.bloomfire.com), designed by a former corporate training manager. After using the platform briefly, Brad commented, “You know almost immediately how to use it. It’s easy to post or capture video, text, graphics, etc. It categorizes topics and can be searched easily.” After that, we knew we had the right tool… now we needed just to figure out how to use it.
By the people and for the people
We knew that for the target audience of this CoP, Bechtel employees on our project sites, the website must quickly prove its value. Members should immediately see how the site could make their jobs easier and help them improve safety and quality on their project. We did not want members to regard the CoP as a flavor of the month or yet another machine that had to be fed something that would generate an additional action item to their work days
Because we were asking people to participate on their own time, it was important that the tone of the site reflect their voice and not that of corporate headquarters. Our CoP was bottom up, a community by the field for the field. The goal was to be a first-stop resource within Bechtel for new technologies, tools, solutions, and best practices for employees on Bechtel projects. While the site was primarily safety oriented, it also needed to be valuable to people in engineering and construction. The title “Boots on the Ground” (BOTG) reflected this goal.
Here is a part of our mission statement:
If you are tired of reinventing the wheel, if you want answers without having to look through six different places, this site may be for you. If you have ideas and knowledge you want to share, if you want to learn what people in other disciplines, sites, and GBUs in Bechtel are doing, this site may be for you. If you want to locate an old school mate or find out what people have been doing in the last 15 minutes, you may want to go someplace else. (If the #$%@ has hit the fan and you need to talk to someone who’s been there before, this site may help.)
You get the picture.
Don’t activate the corporate “immune system”
We used a strategy that had proved successful in the company on previous projects: start small and don’t make waves. We removed the word “initiative” from our vo…
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